Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (26 page)

How come you have to tip your waiter if you don’t have to tip your dental hygienist?

Many people take issue with how the tipping norm forces them to take part in employee compensation—an obligation we’re free of when shopping for, say, office supplies or groceries or when we go to the dentist. The U.S. Department of Labor allows restaurants to pay tipped employees a “sub-minimum wage”—$2.13 an hour as of spring 2013—although employers are required to make up the difference between the sub-minimum and the federal minimum wage ($7.25 in 2013) if the employee isn’t pulling it in in tips. (Some states require the restaurant to pay a higher minimum base. In Arizona, it’s a whole $3; in California, it’s $8.) Before anyone sniffs “Hah! The waiter’s going to make at least the minimum wage!” note that a waiter’s tip is usually not entirely his own. Waiters very often must share their tips—15 or 20 percent of them—with busboys, bartenders, and counter personnel. And in some restaurants, how much the waiter must share is determined not by their total tips but as a percentage of the total of each check. In other words, if some patron really cheaps out on the tip, the waiter may end up paying out more money than he’s made from serving that particular stingy-ass party.

You should expect to leave a 15 to 20 percent tip for the same reason people eat pork chops but not poodle chops: Because that’s just what’s done.

Clearly, our system of paying those who serve us is imperfect, but it’s the system we have. This means we need to factor in the tip as part of the true cost of eating out (in any establishment where you don’t line up for a bag of burgers). The same goes for having drinks in a bar. As for what is a
fair
rate for refilling a water glass, reciting the specials, or bringing a side of mayo, who can say? And as for why the tipping standard is 15 to 20 percent, before tax, there’s really no reason for those particular percentages. A 15 to 20 percent tip is simply the social norm—the understood, customary price for service when one goes out to eat. Because many or most people comply with the norm, there’s a reasonable expectation by the waiter that a customer will leave at least the standard percentage, providing that the service is not lacking in some glaring way. In other words, leaving 15 to 20 percent should be the default—or as Steve Dublanica, a former waiter, restaurant manager, and the author of
The New York Times
best-selling book
Waiter Rant
, put it to me, we need to think of the tip as a “15 to 20 percent commission on the sale of food.”

For those people who snarl that they’re not about to base their payment for service on monkey-see/monkey-do economics, well, that’s their choice. But because the 15 to 20 percent norm is the generally accepted price for service, you are cheating the waiter if you don’t let him know beforehand that you’re a 5 or 10 percenter (or if you plan to leave only a Bible, a smileyface on the check, or a snarky note about what a “loser job” being a waiter is) so he can give you all the service you’re willing to pay for.

What if the service is bad?

Tipping less than 15 percent tells the waiter he sucked in some way. And sure, maybe there were issues. If the waiter stands outside smoking pot or is laughing and texting at the bar when he should be serving you, don’t wait to reprimand him by docking him at tip time. Make an immediate complaint to the manager. (Too many people let bad service go on and on, making their experience at the restaurant a miserable one.)

Understandably, some diners just don’t want to deal with the drama or interruption of complaining in the moment. If you’re one of those people and a waiter turns your meal into an ordeal—making a planned forty-five-minute lunch take two hours because he never comes around and you can’t even ask for what you need—he obviously doesn’t deserve the same tip you’d leave for bright-eyed, bushy-tailed service. So, maybe you leave 8 to 10 percent. (You spent your lunch looking all over for him; now he can look all over for the rest of his tip.)

Sometimes people will feel compelled to leave a good tip for a lousy waiter because they can’t afford to be seen as cheap by those they’re dining with. If you’re taking somebody to lunch on business, you may just decide it’s safest to suck it up and pay the customary tip amount, even if a waiter seems quite undeserving, and consider it a reputation maintenance fee. But Dublanica has what I think is a graceful alternative: giving your tip to the busboy instead of the waiter. This means you haven’t cheaped out on the standard but you also haven’t gone all Stockholm syndrome and rewarded somebody for treating you terribly, either. Should the waiter chase you out the door to complain, as sometimes happens when a customer leaves no tip, you can tell him you gave it to the person you saw doing all the work.

But, let’s be honest about what should be considered terrible service and what are more likely to be ways people justify behaving like cheap bastards at tip time. Did the waiter say certain magic bad words
⁴⁷
that hit you in your pet-peeve zone like “Are you still working on that?” Did he recite the specials in a cheesy way? (Chances are, the restaurant makes him do that.) Are you sticking him with demerits he doesn’t deserve, say, for food that wasn’t to your liking? (He doesn’t prepare the meal; he just delivers it.) And are you sure he’s willfully ignoring you, or does it look like he’s rushing around to cover three other tables, maybe because some other waiter quit without notice or called in sick?

Before you dock a waiter’s tip, it might help to consider “attribution bias,” our tendency to judge the motives and behavior of others more harshly than we judge our own. (This is also referenced in chapter 8, “Going Places,”
here
.) Imagine if you, in doing your job, were judged as severely as some judge a waiter—with your every failing or apparent failing noted in the form of dollars taken out of your paycheck. Projector breaks during your presentation?
Gong!
You take home $200 less this week! Wasn’t your fault? Tough tacos. Your sales pitch wasn’t your best work—maybe because you didn’t sleep well the night before.
Gong!
—$500 less in your check, buster!

Now, maybe your pay
should
be based more directly on your exact moment-to-moment merits—but if that isn’t how it works for you, maybe you can extend the same munificence to your waiter. If, however, in the face of occasional human fallibility, it’s simply too galling to you to pay the customary tip amount, there’s an obvious solution: Stay home and snap your fingers at your cat to bring you your martini
chop-chop
.

From bartenders and baristas to hot dog stand workers: When, where, and what to tip.

Yes, there are now Styrofoam tip cups at hot dog stands, and it shouldn’t be long before there’s a beg jar at the hardware store. Dublanica calls the expansion in the occupations that solicit gratuities “tip creep.” He says that whether to tip for something we’ve never tipped for before is the source of much social anxiety, as well as some anger at the expectation that we pay more money on top of an item’s cost—rather like a tax. Dublanica writes in his book on tipping,
Keep the Change
, “Our country might have been founded on the principle of ‘no taxation without representation,’ but if Thomas Jefferson rose from the dead, bought a double mocha latte at Starbucks, and saw the tip jar, we might have another revolution.”

When you aren’t sure how much to tip, your approach should be the same as I advised in deciding how you’ll behave on the Internet and elsewhere: Think about the sort of person you want to be, and act accordingly. I am very frugal and spent less on my favorite jacket ($2, on sale at the Santa Monica Salvation Army) than a lot of people will pay for a single vegetable, but there’s a difference between frugal and cheap. It’s worth it to me to tip 50 cents at the coffeehouse, even when I get a $1.50 self-serve coffee, and to do as Michael Lynn does and leave a generous tip when I get a plate of eggs at a diner. Forking over a little extra money doesn’t cost me all that much per year, but it makes the person waiting on me feel good, which makes me feel good, and it fosters the sort of world I want to live in—the kind where you
can
work as a waitress in a diner and still pay your electric bill.

Dublanica says he is pretty free with a dollar come tip time—unless you’re making him a hot dog. Dublanica confessed that he tips nothing at a hot dog stand. “It’s what I’m used to,” he explained. But, he agreed with me that how much you tip “boils down to who you are as a person.” You have to ask yourself, “what’s in your heart?” But in case your heart isn’t all that talkative when you come to the tipping crossroads, Dublanica helped me out with a few guidelines:

• Alcohol served at the table in a restaurant

People grouse that the alcohol is a rip-off—that they’re paying $22 for a bottle of wine they could get at Trader Joe’s for $7 and then tipping on the $22, to boot. Some don’t tip on alcohol served at the table at all or tip a reduced rate. (Unfortunately for servers waiting on such people, they may have to tip-share based on the price of the entire check.) Dublanica reminds that you’re paying not just for that bottle of wine but for the atmosphere and the experience in a restaurant and says you should tip 15 to 20 percent on
everything you order
, including the alcohol. “A bottle of wine costs what a bottle of wine costs in a restaurant,” he says. “That’s the game in going. If you don’t like it, don’t buy it.”

• When drinking at the bar

In
Keep the Change
, Dublanica writes that he always went by the old standard of tipping a dollar per drink until he talked to Seamus, an “older Irishman” tending bar in midtown Manhattan. When he asked Seamus about what the standard should be, Seamus said 20 percent—same as you’d tip if you drank the two martinis at the table with your food. “Why am I any different from a server?” Seamus asked. “On a $10 drink, I should get anywhere from $1.50 to $2.”

What about the argument that the bartender (if not providing you with counseling or complicated drinks) isn’t doing much? Dublanica again counters, “If you want to save money, drink at home.” (Also keep in mind that bartenders, like waiters, typically must share their tips with busboys, food runners, the host or hostess, and other nontipped employees.)

I also think there are times when you should leave more than 20 percent, such as when you’re drinking a drink that costs very little—like a soda water—or if you sit at the bar a long time and drink very little. My favorite bar in LA is Hal’s Bar & Grill in Venice. When I go there, in the amount of time others would pound back a few pricey mixed drinks, I’ll sip a single glass of wine ($8) and leave $4, which is my way of making up for how I drink like a fish—a goldfish.

• Table-squatters

If a waiter doesn’t “turn the table”—if you just sit there for hours and hours sharing a single Caesar salad and five glasses of water with your lunch companion—the waiter is probably losing money. There’s a Spanish proverb, “Take what you need, but pay for it.” The tip line is the perfect place to do that—generously.

• Restroom attendants

Dublanica says the standard for men is “a dollar to pee. That’s it for the night.” But, he says, if you’re a woman and you use those goodies the attendant has on hand—hairspray, bobby pins, etc.—you should leave more. Sure, he said, you can get that paper towel they hand you by yourself. “No kidding—we all know basic hygiene since we were four. But why do you not want to give that person a tip? They’re there to keep the bathroom clean.… Is it going to kill you to leave a dollar?”

It’s asking myself that question that has me
sometimes
tipping the bathroom attendants—while resenting being pressured to have a financial transaction with somebody in the bathroom. I carry a purse the size of a gymnasium, well-stocked with beauty supplies, so I use none of those provided. Also, I was born with a stainless-steel spoon in my mouth, so I’m uncomfortable being served when I’m capable of serving myself.

That discomfort nearly led to a minor disaster for me one night at a monthly dinner I used to attend at the upscale Hollywood Japanese restaurant Yamashiro, where they had a bathroom attendant. I so dreaded that moment of pay/don’t pay after being handed a paper towel that I didn’t want to be handed that I once decided to postpone going to the toilet till I got home. I then got stuck in a traffic jam and nearly wet my pants.

• The coat check

Tip a dollar a coat, Dublanica says.

• The restaurant’s parking valet

Tip them when you
drop off your car
, Dublanica says, pointing out that you’re handing over “probably the most expensive thing you own, after your house.” He says, “$2 is standard; for $5, they’re going to remember where they parked your car.” And in case you’re someone whose monthly car payment bill has the word “Ferrari” on it, Dublanica adds, “$20 means you want your car there”—right in front of the restaurant. “You won’t have to wait for it. And then just slip ‘em a buck when you leave.”

• Pizza or other food delivery

“Tip 15 percent or the cost of a gallon of gas, whichever is greater,” Dublanica says.

• The takeout counter at a sit-down restaurant

Dublanica suggests leaving 10 percent but adds, “That’s a ‘What kind of person are you gonna be?’ question. You’re under no obligation to leave a gratuity.”

• Buffet restaurants

Tip 15 percent, Dublanica says, explaining in
Keep the Change
, “Well, someone has to clear your dishes and refill your sodas.”